My appreciation of wood is a gift my father has given me. One of his barns is filled high with stickered stacks of wood slabs he has collected or milled himself over the years – and in each board and turn of grain, I see the potential to make something beautiful. So, when the flooring for our house arrived and we brought it inside to acclimate, it was with great pleasure that my dad, Dave, and I stacked the wide plank boards of white oak from the Appalachian Mountains.

Our goal is to use locally sourced wood as much as possible and when a wood product doesn’t come from our region, we choose domestic wood (or salvaged wood for tight old-growth grain). If we had more time for our project, we might have milled wide-plank pine floors (because Ponderosa Pine grows so well in our region), although my preference was for Hardy Oak flooring.

After a couple of weeks to acclimate the hardwood, installers began in the great room/kitchen.

We chose to use wood flooring throughout the house, except in the bathrooms and mudroom/laundry, as a way to unify the spaces and add the warmth of wood to the modern architectural form. Even though I am biased toward modern architectural forms, I am a sucker for the feeling of an old farmhouse wood floor.

How many of us have been delighted during a remodel to pull up layers of flooring and discover the treasure of wood floors buried beneath? The miner’s cottage that Dave and I fixed up as our first project together, 20 years ago, had a wide-plank fir subfloor that became the main floor. All the dings and scratches etched into it had a history and story that started in 1890 that we added a few lines too! When thinking about the kind of “legacy” building I wanted to create it included solid wood floors that hopefully will age well with time. There are already a couple dings in the floor — they happened during construction despite our best effort — and I will think of those imperfections as part of our story! (I don’t know if I will be able to use that line on a client, though, so better floor protection is always a goal.)

The select-grade 8-in.-wide flooring that we were able to use is stunning. There were predominately longboards in the order and it all is truly select-grade flooring.

The team chose a Rubio Monocoat to protect the floor and preserve the natural look of the flooring seen here during the installation.

If you would are interested in a new wide plank flooring installation please contact us.